This blog explores a family history search. It addresses genealogy, Jewish heritage travel and artwork. It has taken the author to Belarus, the Ukraine and Poland where she visited her ancestral towns as well as Lithuania where she studied Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. As the author is both an artist and a genealogist, the blog also addresses her artwork related to her family and cultural history.

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Saturday, April 28, 2012

Lozan Sha

Sometimes an idea for a painting evolves, other times it starts out clearly conceived and the challenge is in the execution. I've been working on one of the latter. One of our interviewees in the Jewish Identity and Legacy project shared a number of stories with us from her childhood. One of her stories featured the old Lyndale shul and went like this…
We went to the old shul on Lyndale, the Lyndale shul. That was a beautiful building, it was just gorgeous, it really was the prettiest one ever built in this whole state. It had the columns. When you walked in there you felt you were in a shul, you were in a house of worship. You weren’t just in a fancy place where this one had candy and this one was serving…No you went to a shul. And of course the women sat upstairs. I sat upstairs with my mother. And I don’t know how anybody would pray there because everybody was talking to somebody else, kissing all the kids and talking to someone else.

And if it got late, they’d go to shul and they’d have services, a week before the holidays they’d have a late service until 11 o’clock at night. It was always later with the orthodox shuls because they had more to say. It always took more than it said so in the book. They had more to read, they had more to say, then they would stop and they would talk to somebody here and they’d talk to somebody there and they’d stand there with a big gavel and say, “Lozan shah”. You know people would talk so they would say “Lozan shah”. Well so that’s what they did so we didn’t get home until late. The kids, a lot of us, I was a kid then, my mother would give me her coat and I’d cover up and lay down on the empty seats around there and sleep until they were through. My father would carry me home.

I searched for a picture of the old Lyndale shul and was unable to find any of its interior. I have been in an Orthodox synagogue on very few occasions and it represented a somewhat foreign world to me. In fact I realized that most of my experiences were literally foreign and occurred overseas. On my last night in Vilnius we went to the one remaining synagogue for Shabbat services and sat in the balcony. I remembered I had some photos of the synagogue from before the service and used that for reference. It fit the description she offered as it had soaring columns.

In the Vilnius synagogue I remembered feeling rather detached from what was going on below as the women were not active participants. When I painted this image I thought about the women's balcony as a unique world, separate from that of the men. I wanted it to be defined while the world of the men was blurred and indistinct. I pictured it from a child's perspective, being lulled to sleep by the voices and with her mother's hand resting on her creating a sense of safety and security.

In order to create a sense of mystery in the synagogue below I first did a painting with some detail and then did a veil of white paint to make it less distinct. I used gold and a transparent yellow ochre to literally make it glow, a sense that I imagined must have been heightened for my interviewee when she was a child. I wanted to create the suggestion of figures in the women’s balcony as it angled around the synagogue interior and random gatherings of men below, both as she described and as I witnessed in Vilnius.

The focal point of the painting was to be the child herself, huddled under her mother’s coat and connected to her mother by a gentle hand resting on her head. This is one of the rare instances where I had an idea of what the painting should look like when I started and it actually materialized more or less as I’d imagined. I am always a bit astonished when that happens.

This project has been made possible in
part through the Arts and Cultural Heritage
Fund through the vote of Minnesotans on
November 4, 2008. Administered by the
Minnesota Historical Society.

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Welcome

Welcome to this blog. In these pages I address the issues that are of deep interest to me. I take you on my travels to Eastern Europe, my observations about the former and present Jewish communities in those countries and the response of those countries to their history. I capture this in both words and artwork and frequently share my artwork in these pages. In addition I address my genealogy research based on family who originated in many of the places I explore. This has been a process of discovery for me and I invite you to join me on this journey.

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About Me

Susan Weinberg researches, paints and writes about family, cultural and community history. Her family history interests and travel frequently inform her artwork.
Susan writes of her travel to ancestral towns throughout Eastern Europe and her artwork based on those communities.
Susan has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally. Her most recent body of work is the Jewish Identity and Legacy project, a project which includes oral history and art creation. Based in Minneapolis-St Paul, Susan creates artwork and does genealogy consulting. She speaks frequently on her artwork and genealogy topics. She maintains two blogs, Layers of the Onion with a family history and art focus and Creative Connections on the Minneapolis Jewish Artists' Lab.